Improving Named Entity Recognition for Chinese Social Media with Word Segmentation Representation Learning
This addresses NER accuracy for Chinese social media users, representing an incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of named entity recognition (NER) for Chinese social media by jointly training NER and word segmentation using an LSTM-CRF model, resulting in nearly 5% absolute improvement over previous results.
Named entity recognition, and other information extraction tasks, frequently use linguistic features such as part of speech tags or chunkings. For languages where word boundaries are not readily identified in text, word segmentation is a key first step to generating features for an NER system. While using word boundary tags as features are helpful, the signals that aid in identifying these boundaries may provide richer information for an NER system. New state-of-the-art word segmentation systems use neural models to learn representations for predicting word boundaries. We show that these same representations, jointly trained with an NER system, yield significant improvements in NER for Chinese social media. In our experiments, jointly training NER and word segmentation with an LSTM-CRF model yields nearly 5% absolute improvement over previously published results.